Art Blauvelt (BA, 1973) is healthy and still working as lawyer and part-time judge. After Western attended University of Puget Sound Law School, practiced in Tacoma and then moved to Montesano, WA in 1981. Married to Linda (WWSC 1974), with two children and two grandchildren. Served 14 years on Timberland Regional Library Board of Trustees and just completing 10th year as Grays Harbor College Trustee. Loves hiking and touring Southwest Utah and New Mexico and traveling to Europe.
Geri Forsberg
Geri Forsberg is fast at work teaching, researching, and writing. This year Geri developed a new approach to teaching technical writing. Students research historical documents that have transformed culture—such documents as the Magna Carta, the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Human Rights, the Equal Pay Act, and many others. Students study what life was like before the document was written, how the document came about, and how life changed after the document was written. They also consider how the document is relevant to their lives today. Students then write magazine articles, an academic research poster, and visual presentations based on their research. Their research posters are presented at the Humanities Research Day at Western. Students have said that their appreciation of history has grown, and their critical thinking skills have developed. Geri is also presenting her research on “Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul in Dialog” at the Media Ecology Association annual conference in Toronto this June.
Mary Janell Metzger
Mary Janell Metzger presented “Teaching the Tragedy of White Supremacy in Shakespeare’s Othello” at the British Shakespeare Association meeting in Belfast. Her essay “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice” is forthcoming in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (Birmingham UP). She was invited to present a paper on “Teaching Shakespeare for Social Change In, and Beyond, The College Classroom” as part of a 2020 plenary panel at the Shakespeare Association of America on Pedagogy and Social Justice. In spring term, she and her Senior Seminar participated in a national project called “The Qualities of Mercy” in which college Shakespeare students across the country each produce a video of one scene in The Merchant of Venice, after studying the play in light of contemporary, and local, issues of immigration and structural inequality. The linked videos will be uploaded in sequence for viewing on Youtube
Dawn Dietrich
Dawn Dietrich recently published “’For America to Rise, it’s a Matter of Black Lives/And We Gonna Free Them, so We Can Free Us’: 13th and Social Justice Documentaries in the Age of ‘Fake News,’” in Pacific Coast Philology, Special Edition: Ways of Seeing: Visuality, Visibility, and Vision, vol. 54, issue 2 (2019), forthcoming. She was also honored to be featured as part of a roundtable on The Impact of N. Katherine Hayles’s NEH Summer Seminar on the Field, 1995-2001, Special Session. Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago, IL, January 3-6, 2019, in honor of N. Katherine Hayles’ retirement. Dawn will offer two news courses next year: English 423 Major Authors: Haruki Murakami and English 238 Society & Literature: Horror across Media.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.
Christopher Loar
Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.